The New Socialism

Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill is busy abrogating the rights of shareholders of Anheuser-Busch this week.

As I wrote in these recent posts, here and here, Busch would do their shareholders a favor by selling to InBev.

Now, McCaskill is weighing in to try to block any purchase of the ailing, underperforming brewer by the international beer giant.

Is this a member of the same US Senate that squawks about shareholder democracy and voting on CEO compensation?

So it's okay to strip shareholders of their right to a better return by selling the company to an acquirer offering a higher price than the inept Busch family can deliver. That, evidently, is not abrogating shareholder democracy principles.

Sounds like another bout of federal government socialism to me. Of course what McCaskill really wants is to preserve jobs in St. Louis, no matter how that affects the actual owners of the Anheuser-Busch company.

Yesterday, on Fox News, I saw an interview with a Democratic House member from New York who actually called for all US oil refineries to be nationalized, so that,

'the people of America can decide how much gasoline they want to produce.'

Can it get any scarier than that?

At a time of US recovery from financial excesses in the mortgage market- which, we now learn, was abetted by the apparent bribery of Democratic Senators Dodd and Conrad by Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide- and a softening of growth, why does anyone think that bureaucratic functionaries and politicians in Washington know anything more about how to run businesses, create jobs and/or wealth than the millions of Americans who actually do that everyday throughout the country?

From the Senate witch hunt among the American oil company CEOs to their desire to bail out the very mortgage companies who bribed Senators, with taxpayer money, it seems that we are suddenly in the grip of a big wave of socialism in our federal government.

Hopefully, American business will survive this round of flirtations with the creeping socialism of our economy, but I'm getting worried.